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Flash Tool of the Week—Make Flash and iOS Games with Stencyl

Today, we are going to share an awesome Flash game making tool—Stancyl. It is a game creation engine that helps you make iOS and Flash games on Mac or PC; and it is easy to use with no advanced knowledge requirement for coding.

Overview

Stencyl is not a single tool, but a complete set of intuitive tools that helps you make Flash games in a flash. It simplifies the development process and accelerates workflow by rich ready-to-use resources. The program supports multiple exports which allow publishing games to Flash, iOS, Windows, Mac and Chrome web store.

Comprehensive toolset

Stencyl is not a single tool, but a game studio that has everything you need to create a game, such as scene, behaviors, physics, background and properties. It provides an image editing component to create the artwork and graphics, a programming side to take care of the native APIs and the ability to export you work to different platforms.

Develop in simplicity

Stencyl has a simple drag-and-drop interface with hundreds of readymade blocks, built-in Flixel and Box2D engines. Building games becomes as simple as snapping together blocks, building prototypes and constructing worlds as you see fit.

You can use Actor Editor to tweak your prototypes’ appearances and behaviors. After designing or importing the prototypes and objects your game, you can define their properties and choose how they will interact with their environment and other characters. There are even readymade movement actions that can be applied to them.

Moreover, you are forced to split chunks of “code” into behaviors, which are something like classes, and every behavior can be used in other projects, allowing you to save a lot of time once you have your custom.

No coding is great, but not enough

No coding seems attractive, but it doesn’t mean you really do so. If you prefer to write your own code blocks, that’s just great. They fully support coding in Object-C.

If you are not familiar with a given language like AS3 or Objective-C, the block builder will deal with the coding issues for you. So you can focus on the full control of game logic rather than the language syntax. However, that’s just not enough. You still need some programming skills to sort out the best of Stencyl. If you just drag and drop instructions here and there, without knowing what’s a global variable, or an array, or the linear damping of a Box2D object, probably you won’t go much further from a Hello World project.

Multiple exports

In Stencyl, you can export game in different platforms like iOS, Flash, desktop and the Chrome Web Store; Android and HTML5 supports are on the way. Players will have multiple choice to access your game.

Conclusion

Simplicity is the best advantage of Stencyl. It makes game development a fairly easy process. And easy doesn’t mean low quality, instead, Stencyl is capable of making you game idea to live and developing qualified Flash games.

Pros: simplicity, no advanced coding requirement, multiple export.

Cons: publish to App Store you need to buy Pro license.

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